AEI congressional scholar Kevin Kosar has an excellent piece up at Public Discourse that is worth your time:

Now that a couple of weeks have passed and the noise has begun to subside, we can take a broader view of what McCarthy’s election suggests about Congress and the state of American politics. The media had it wrong: to equate Mr. McCarthy’s struggles to win the Speakership with political dysfunction is to grossly misunderstand both politics and Congress. In truth, the long debate over who should be speaker was a healthy expression of Madisonian transactional politics, and it helped illuminate the path toward restoring the people’s House as the seat of American self-government.

Kosar concludes:

Had James Madison been watching on C-SPAN, he would not have been surprised by the long debates and many rounds of votes. Humans are flawed beings partial to their own views, and liberty foments diversity. Congress is the place where ambition is supposed to counter ambition, and where interests are supposed to collide. Bargaining across difference is what a legislature is supposed to do, and legislators need the power to do just that.
Yet Mr. Madison quite possibly would have shaken his head in disbelief at the media’s relentless framing of the battle for the speakership as political dysfunction. And, no fan of parties, he also might well have guffawed at the media’s presumption that the representatives assembled should behave as partisans rather than legislators representing distinct districts. Nonetheless, the fight over the speakership was a healthy development for the institution, and we should welcome the House of Representatives’ return to the cacophonous, disputatious place the Founders designed it to be.

As I wrote at the time, a fractious vote where we don’t know the outcome in advance is not a sign of chaos. It’s how Congress is supposed to be.